Grants

This research project addresses in depth the questions of the nature of economic uncertainty, with the aim of revisiting from a new perspective many of the questions that have been raised by the recent crisis both in finance and macroeconomics.

This research project captures systemic risk of the credit market by combining information about the level of fragility of individual economic entities with the network structure of their mutual credit exposures.

This research project provides us with a greater understanding of why the Coase theorem came to captivate the minds of economics and legal scholars and how its impact on economics and law reshaped both the theoretical landscape and legal-economic policymaking.

This research project constructs new measures of slavery as a state-sanctioned property rights institution and documents how slavery impacted economic development in US history.

This research project deepens the understanding of the history of economics as a discipline by making economic texts of historical importance available to students and scholars and by translating the important historical works of economics into English.

This research project demonstrates the ways in which fact and value are entangled in economic concepts and the implications of this entanglement for the ways in which various economic problems are approached.

This research project reinterprets the events causing the British Industrial Revolution by showing that the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 was significant in causing the divergence of political institutions which led to the divergence of economic institutions and policy.

This research project analyzes the history of the concentration of bank regulatory authority within the Federal Reserve and explores the public policy issues arising from that concentration.

This research project examines the value of political connections between corporate groups in Italy and the National Fascist Party (PNF) during the years of Mussolini’s rise to power (1921-1929).

This research project uses reflexivity thinking to develop a theory of reflexive economic agents whose behavior is central to both the theory of innovation and to the explanation of phenomena such as bubbles, cascades, and herding that are inconsistent with DSGE/rational expectations macroeconomics.

This research project focuses on the role of the representative agent in recent macroeconomics and general equilibrium theory, with a particular emphasis on how different the situation was in the economic theorizing of the first neoclassical synthesis during the 1950s.

This research project extends proven techniques in statistical learning theory so that they cover the kind of models and data of most interest to macroeconomic forecasting.

This research project develops a software program for economic simulation that makes it easy to develop dynamic, monetary models of the macro-economy.

This research project analyzes the determinants of wage share, taking account of country-specific institutional aspects, in order to contribute to the theory of distribution, combining insights from political economy, institutional economics, and industrial relations.

This research project considers and casts doubts on the stationarity properties of macroeconomic data that are key to New Classical models with implications for the understanding of long-term economic growth, shorter term business cycles, stabilization policy, and industrial and development policy.

This research project explores the relationship between environmental regulation, innovation, and competitiveness through a meta-analysis, which extracts key implications for economic thinking and future research, and unique datasets on patented “environmental” inventions.

This research project aims to better understand the impact of various forms of central bank communication by blending techniques from psychology and political science.

This research project compiles and annotates the archival legacy of the Bellagio Group’s founders Fritz Machlup, Robert Triffin, and William Fellner as they sought to reform the international financial system between 1963 and 1974.

This research project argues that economics currently lacks the capability to assess when mathematical modeling, on its own, is a sufficient means for understanding a given set of social phenomena.

This research project collects data that measures maternal knowledge about the impacts of investments on child development and estimates the role such knowledge plays in the determination of economic and social inequality.

This research project examines the political and ideological implications of different ways of framing the relationship between humanity, nature, and the world of goods.

This research project provides the mathematics for a second marginal revolution enabling the natural modeling of heterogeneous agents with unstable beliefs, fully dynamic preferences, and allowances for an increased level of self-inconsistency.

This research project creates a computational model of the current financial crisis to discover the essential elements needed to reproduce the crisis, while investigating alternative policies that may have reduced its intensity and strategies for recovery.

This research project develops an approach to policy analysis in the context of a macroeconomic model that does not assume that people in the economy forecast the economy’s future evolution under any given policy in the same way as the policy analyst’s own model does.

This research project uses spatial cross-sectional variation in addition to time series variation to estimate fiscal multipliers; the impact of anti-predatory lending laws on housing prices, default rates, and foreclosures; and the impact of raising wages during recessions.

This research project explores how the output of firms outside of the financial sector is affected by the health of the banks and other financial institutions.

This research project focuses on the effect of the technological changes that led to the British Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century on the market for skilled workers.

This research project will examine the long-term costs of macroeconomic instability in a major metropolitan area and the direct impact of macroeconomic shocks on technological discovery.

This research project investigates the influence of economic doctrines on policy norms in recent decades through analysis of the history of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

This research project explores ways to influence policy, starting with selected UK regulators, pension funds, and asset management groups, by testing the feasibility of “emotional finance” solutions to the prevention of future financial crises.

This research project explores and documents the development of graduate economics training in the leading centers of doctoral education in the United States.

This research project uncovers the economic forces which reshaped the evolution of the imperial examination system in traditional China, using a new dataset from archival sources of ancient Chinese Books.

This research project examines the relationship between the creation of money, price formation, and income flows, assuming no restrictions to the volume of credit, while abstracting from the existence of speculative crises and the role of the public sector in the process of monetary creation.

This research project shows what economists can learn from political philosophers in thinking about economic inequality while also investigating the philosophical significance of recent empirical work on inequality, within economics and elsewhere.

This research project offers a radical reconsideration of the centrality of the Corn Returns to the development of classical liberal political economy and shows how much the Corn Laws enriched agrarian interests and how their repeal represented a boost to British manufacturing.

This research project examines how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that into mathematics.

This research project studies the endogenous emergence of systemic risk and bubble-and-burst dynamics and the transmission of financial shocks to the real economy.

This research project documents long-run trends in personal bankruptcy, with special emphasis on the use of the bankruptcy law at the local level and among women.

This research project constructs a new theory of the relationship between law and finance through using case studies drawn from the global financial crisis as analytical windows for determining deficiencies of established theoretical frameworks

This research project studies the drivers of technology adoption as well as the consequences of the dynamics of technology adoption for economic growth.

This research project analyzes the ways in which an important financial institution, the stock market, affects the economic performance of the industrial corporations that are listed on it.

This research project offers a theoretical and empirical reassessment of alternative fiscal policy actions to tease out their advantages and disadvantages.

This research project analyses the possibility of achieving economic and financial stability, high employment, and good social outcomes, in the presence of clearly defined resource and environmental limits, even if these mean some limits to economic growth.

This research projects aims to understand Buddhist thinking in rational choice terms and apply that to some important contemporary economic problems.

This research project develops a comprehensive research agenda to formulate proposals that will help make the financial sector sustainable and facilitate a transition to sustainable economic development.

This research project explores the implications for the economics of gender stereotypes that consider self-interested economic behavior and risk-taking to be masculine and care and caution to be feminine.

The project provides new ideas and policy proposals to contain the spread of systemic risk in the financial system through appropriate regulation of financial markets and intermediaries, as well as the design of monetary policy.

This research project enhances our understanding of how endowments and subsequent opportunities and shocks explain the evolution of individual and family well-being across generations.

This research project develops a monograph on divergent stochastic time series that permits the modeling of capital, inventory, and financial capital in economies.

This research project develops an operational measure of systemic risk, as an input into the policy process by capturing the interaction of private and governmental sources of systemic risk during and in advance of the crisis.

This research project recounts the intellectual history of the dollar as an international reserve currency, starting with World War I, which brought the international gold standard to an end, and continuing all the way up to the present global financial crisis.

This research project develops a much better understanding of Paul Samuelson’s life, work, and broader political-economic vision through archival research at Duke University’s Paul Samuelson archives.

This research project explores the factors producing “herding” in the economics profession and professional investment community with the goal of articulating policy changes appropriate to the organization of the economics profession and its practices in particular.